Psychoanalysis notion of ‘pathological shame’ is the anxiety of sexual repression when what was originally pleasurable turned into disgust and therefore, victims of sexual trauma are known to experience this. One of Hanif Kureishi’s short stories; The Penis and a part of Eve Ensler’s play; My Vagina Was My Village were chosen to fulfill the purpose of current topic. These literary pieces were selected based on the protagonists’ experience which led them to suffer ‘pathological shame’. The study found that both characters (Doug from The Penis and the narrator from My Vagina Was My Village) dissociated themselves through abstract self-mutilation of their genitals as a consequence to their traumatic encounter. The study intends to provide new readings on the effect of sexual trauma with particular underlining to self-mutilation. Keyword; sexual trauma, pathological shame, self-mutilation, dissociation. Introduction Sexual trauma is normally associated to child sexual abuse where the victim is exposed to sexual situation in a passive and unprepared state (Brette, 2005, p. 1592). However, in the view of the present study, not only children are prone to experience sexual trauma. It can also be experienced by adults who are subjected to such sexual situations before they are ready or consensual of the exposure. As stated by Campbell (2008), “a child who is subjected to sexual abuse is intruded upon visually and physically before he or she is ready” (p. 78) for sexual contact. Therefore, if an adult who is also subjected to sexual abuse before he or she is ready for any sexual encounter, he or she is also ‘intruded upon’. This is supported by Maker, Kemmelmeier, & Peterson (2001) that “adult sexual trauma was defined as any type of nonconsensual sexual act occurring after the age of 16 years old” (p. 352). As a representation on the effects of adult sexual trauma, two literary pieces are chosen for the study; The Penis by Hanif Kureishi and My Vagina Was My Village by Eve Ensler. The study intends to answer the following research questions; (a) what are the defense mechanisms produced by the characters as the effect of sexual trauma in both literary pieces?, and (b) what are the underlying reasons for the characters to produce such defense mechanisms? Literature Review of the Works Midnight All Day (1999) is a collection of short stories written by Hanif Kureishi which comprises of different stories told from different perspectives. The Penis, one of the short stories in the collection tells the story of a character named Doug who is a pornographic actor/porn star. Partnering up with Long Dong, his penis personified as his alter-ego from his internal conflict with himself, both of them gain somewhat successful PATHOLOGICAL SHAME AS DEFENSE MECHANISM IN HANIF KUREISHI’S International*Conference*on*Language,*Literature,*Culture*and*Education** 30th%&%31st%January,%2016! 30* reputation to land on some roles in films such as The Little Women and Huge Big Women. This story reaches its peak when Long Dong separates itself from Doug. Long Dong expresses its feeling of being exploited ever since Doug’s pornographic involvement in his teen life. As the aftermath of being traumatized by the experience of having to be physically exposed under hot lightings with many eyes scrutinising them inside out all the time, he wishes to escape his current life. This portrays Doug’s inner motive of escaping through the construction of his imagination where he lost his penis. Despite the penis unwillingness to reconnect with Doug, Doug manages to find Long Dong and they are reunited at the end of the story. Hanif Kureishi’s works had mostly been studied through the sociological, psychological, and feminist perspectives. In a study done by Chalupský on a novella Intimacy (1998) written by Kureishi, it is found that the short stories collections which also include Midnight All Day written by Kureishi around the time when the novella was published can be read through the same theme of unresolved dilemmas in the mid-life crises of the male characters (Chalupský, 2011, p. 63). The narration of the works was also seen as fragmented, inconsistent, and leaving the readers hanging with no answers to the questions asked (Chalupský, 2011, pp. 66-67). Kureishi’s most popular work would be The Body (2002) which had been numerously studied on especially on the consequences of technology in body modification and the issue of youth and beauty. Parlati (2014) found that Kureishi had bitterly portrayed how a body that had been intruded will become nostalgic since the true self is lost with the replacement of a new body and a rival mind (pp. 81-82). Other than that, Ekici (2010) discovered that the novel had depicted how the body surpasses the soul and how destructive it is to pursue eternal youth and beauty (pp. 70-71). Meanwhile, The Vagina Monologues (2001) is a play written by Eve Ensler constructed from an outcome of interviews with women from all parts of the world on their personal views of their vaginas and also personal experiences particularly sexual encounter. In a part of the monologues, My Vagina Was My Village narrated from a first person point of view, describes her vagina metaphorically as an undisturbed village, purest and cleanest in its nature, a place she once familiar with until it is invaded by the cruelty of the soldiers. The narrator describes how the soldiers shove up things into her vagina such as long thick rifle, bottles, sticks and also the end of a broom. She listens to the sound of her vagina tearing and a piece of her vagina being butchered off. Not only that she encounters physical sexual abuse of being raped by different soldiers at a time but she also has to endure mental abuse being in fear if the soldiers will end her life. Due to her traumatized sexual encounter, she removes herself from her genital; the vagina is no longer her village. The Vagina Monologues had been studied mostly under the lens of feminism theory. Some of the issues discussed about are women’s exploitation, freedom, and also lesbianism. Mazurski explored the issue of women’s victimization in the monologue and found that Ensler had framed the idea of women being coerced into wearing the garment called burqa as a method of treating women as “other” (Mazurski, 2015, p. 74). Along the line, Dubey & Singh (2015) found that Ensler held a vision for all women to free themselves from exploitation and sufferings (p. 262) through self-empowerment in her New Age feminist perspective (p. 252). On the other hand, Durham (2012) critiques the monologue for its contradiction of the author’s intention and content in representing lesbian identity as somewhat a form of censorship since the whole monologue is still bound to the heterosexual symbolic (pp. 59-60). PATHOLOGICAL SHAME AS DEFENSE MECHANISM IN HANIF KUREISHI’S International*Conference*on*Language,*Literature,*Culture*and*Education** 30th%&%31st%January,%2016! 31* The current paper will however study both literary pieces through the lens of psychoanalysis focusing on defense mechanisms after a traumatic sexual exposure rather than focusing on the sociological or feminist aspects in the characters.

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Pathological Shame as Defense Mechanism in Hanif Kureishi’s The Penis and Eve Ensler’s My Vagina Was My Village

Abstract Hanif Kureishi’s 2014 novel, The Last Word, involves most of the author’s idiosyncratic themes, such as ethnicity, racism, sexual identity, examination of interpersonal relationships and the crucial role of the creative imagination in human life. Its focal concern, however, is to explore the process of writing a literary biography of a living person and the character and dynamics of the relationship between the biographer and his subject - a writer. As such, the novel can be taken as being representative of biographic metafiction, a subcategory of historiographic metafiction, which, following the postmodernist questioning of our ability to know and textually represent historical truth, presents biographic writing critically or even mockingly, rendering its enthusiastic practitioners’ efforts with ironic scepticism. The aim of this article is to present The Last Word as a particular example of biographic metafiction that has all the crucial features of this genre, yet which differs from its predecessors through the complexity and thoroughness of its portrayal of the biographer-biographee relationship.

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Dodging the Literary Undertaker – Biographic Metafiction in Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word

Hanif Kureishi’s works contain numerous autobiographical features and are peopled with characters that often bear a striking similarity not only to the author himself but also to his relatives and ex-partners. Intimacy (1998) is conceived as the dramatic confessional monologue of a middle-aged man about to leave his partner and two children to live with a younger woman, an experience the author himself had not long before its publication. This article deals with the novella in the broader context of the author’s late 1990s texts in order to distinguish between autobiographic narrative and writing from experience, showing that the latter rather than the former is employed in these works. Supported by Kureishi’s defence of the book as a literary game it also argues that rather than providing a hateful perspective on femininity the novella offers a variation on one of the author’s idiosyncrasies – a hopeful belief in love and humanity. The article further attempts to explore the possibilities and limitations of the genre of confessional narrative as exemplified in Intimacy.

https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/118140/1_BrnoStudiesEnglish_37-2011-2_7.pdf?sequence=1

Prick Lit or Naked HoPe? SeLf-exPoSure iN HaNif kureiSHi'S IntImacy

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Non-normative Victorians : Ian McGuire's The North Water as a neo-Victorian novel

Jim Crace is a unique representative of contemporary British fiction whose novels are characterised by a distinct narrative style and diction, compelling parable-like stories, and an exceptional sense of space. The settings of his novels, no matter how diverse in terms of geographic location and historical time, evince certain idiosyncratic features which make them both other and familiar for readers. Referring to himself as a “landscape writer”, Crace always explores the close interconnectedness, physical as well as mental, between his protagonists and the places they inhabit. His 2013 novel, Harvest, is even more complex in this regard as it also includes the theme of the map-making of its imaginary landscapes. Using a variety of geocritical approaches, this article attempts to show that the novel is a remarkable example of literary cartography in that it combines subjectivist and objectivist approaches to textual representation of space.

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"Something odd and beautiful" : literary cartography in Jim Crace's Harvest

Ian McEwan’s penultimate novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is a remarkable achievement, not only in the context of the contemporary British literary scene but also within the body of its author’s work. Although it is written in the form of a spy thriller, with an element of romance, the novel by far transcends the limits of this genre. It provides an intriguing exploration of McEwan’s favourite themes, but also contains a notable dimension of intertextual and metafictional playfulness, which in this case is highly self-reflective as he makes direct references to his own fiction, namely to his short stories from the collection In Between the Sheets (1978). Therefore, in terms of its thematic and narrative framework, Sweet Tooth can be especially linked with two of his earlier novels, The Innocent (1990) and Atonement (2001). This article argues that McEwan’s use of playful narrative strategies is not a result of his intention to write an experimental text challenging the traditional notion of the story and the plot, but rather serves as a means of his defence of a strong story as a crucial factor of a quality narrative.

https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/134766/1_BrnoStudiesEnglish_41-2015-1_8.pdf

Petr Chalupský

Papers

Prick Lit or Naked HoPe? SeLf-exPoSure iN HaNif kureiSHi'S IntImacy

Non-normative Victorians : Ian McGuire's The North Water as a neo-Victorian novel

"Something odd and beautiful" : literary cartography in Jim Crace's Harvest

Playfulness as apologia for a strong story in ian mcewan's sweet tooth